


The Sound of Thunder

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-04-05 17:06:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19044715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Morgan does not know who most of these sad grown-up people are, although they are all here for the purpose of mourning her father (who is not and cannot be what they say he is, Morgan thinks).She does happen to know the name of the big blond man sitting up in her barn loft clubhouse with a half-empty wine bottle, though. She'll let him stay there for now.





	The Sound of Thunder

…

Around the third hour or so, Morgan maneuvers her way between the stolid legs of their guests all dressed in black and sneaks a juice pop from the freezer.

She uses a commendable degree of stealth and a polka-dot plastic footstool to accomplish this – the juice pops are the kind with jokes printed onto their sticks, although Daddy usually guesses the punchline before Morgan can reach it – and then walks with her prize out the back door of the house into the barn.

She does not even know half these somber, grown-up people, although they keep coming up to Mommy and saying things in low voices that make Mommy’s face tremble a little in the center like a raindrop at the end of a leaf.  Morgan wishes they would all go away; Daddy does not like  strange guests much, either, and if they all went away then he could probably come back from wherever he is hiding.

(Morgan also wishes that she had gotten to keep the pretty wreath, since Mommy had specially asked Morgan to help pick out the pink and white flowers for it, but now it has floated away across the lake and broken apart over the surface of the bright water.)

She sticks the lemonade-flavored juice pop in her mouth while using both hands to scale the ladder to the barn loft. There are tricolor holiday lights strung along the rafters and a holographic sign that specifies ‘MORGAN’S SPOT; KEEP OUT; TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW,’ which must not be terribly effective because there is already somebody sitting up there.

“Oh.” The man is holding a wine bottle by its swan-slender neck and draws it suddenly away from his mouth when he sees her.  He wipes something hastily off his face. “Excuse me, Miss Stark.”

Morgan gestures at him with her juice pop. “There’s no boys allowed up here. If you want to stay you have to give me your identifaction.” She scrunches her nose and tries again. “Your edification.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t got much of that to share with anybody these days.” With a ponderous, weary slowness, he shifts himself to make a better space for her. The plywood boards creak beneath him. “Why don’t you just pretend I’m not here?”

Morgan looks at him more closely. He is huge from top to bottom as well as from shoulder to shoulder, with a big belly pinched inside his stiff new black suit coat, and his thick-thatched beard falls nearly to his chest. His blonde hair needs to be brushed and one of his eyes is a different color than the other, the sky-blue paired with an amber-brown like the swirls inside a glass shooting marble. He is wearing gloves that cut off at the knuckles and when he smiles at her Morgan recognizes him. 

“You’re Thor,” she says, “aren’t you?”

“If you’d like me to be.”

She sticks the juice pop between her teeth again and scrambles up into the loft beside him. The man from Daddy’s framed photographs – except he wears a red cape and shining armor, in those, like a Disney movie prince, and is holding a big hammer – circumspectly tips the wine bottle to his mouth again.

Morgan settles in to finish her juice pop. The air of the barn is warm and stuffy and the ice begins dripping onto her hand: but from up here everything looks unchanged and sensible and is therefore exactly the way it is supposed to be, so that the bad things Mommy and other people have told Morgan cannot possibly be true.

(Things die, of course. Morgan knows this. She is not some stupid baby.

Flowers die in their clay pots after the autumn frost comes. Moths die suspended within the trembling, glittering galaxy of a spider’s web covered in dew. Birds die when they crash themselves against the window, great pine trees die when they are thrown down by a wind from the northeast, drops of blood die when they splash from a cut on Morgan’s finger onto the bathroom counter: and people die, people die, people die, but Morgan also knows that her father is special.

Daddy does not do things in the same way as other people. Those are not the rules.)

Morgan gets to the end of her juice pop and reads the joke before dropping its stick down through the boards of the loft: What’s the hardest thing about learning to ride a bike? The pavement. 

The man beside her has not said anything, and in fact has hardly moved except to raise and lower that ocean-dark bottle, although his eyes are open and his young man-old man face is drawn into hard, tight lines. Morgan scoots onto her knees so that she can turn towards him.

“Are you really the one who makes it thunder?”

Thor looks down at her. He blinks. 

“What?”

“Thunder,” Morgan repeats. “The cartoon said –” she must think a moment upon this important matter; the videos from the public library were very, very old and featured an orange-haired woman with a pet lizard and a school bus “—the cartoon said thunder’s what you get when lightning goes – ” she cuts the air in front of her with a splicing sound effect “—and then the air goes —” she crashes her palms mightily together in the space created “—the thermal expansion of plasma in the lightning channel gets heated to, uh, thirty thousand billion degrees Kelvin and it makes a shock wave. Then the sound travels a thousand feet per second and you hear thunder. Is that true?”

Thor lifts the bottle as though in a toast.  “Yes, you are most certainly Stark’s daughter.”

“But Daddy says that’s not how thunder’s really made,” Morgan insists; Daddy had found her hiding beneath her bed during a storm, one night, so he had maneuvered his way in next to her with the dust bunnies and the stray socks to tell her how things worked. “He said that stuff’s a bunch of hooey. He told me it’s really just you fighting giants in outer space with your lighting and keeping everybody safe, so that’s why I don’t have to be – scared about it, even when it gets loud. He said, um, he said –”

Said, Morgan realizes. He said, he said.

It does not sound right, although Morgan cannot understand why, but then she thinks about the Spanish verb conjugations Mommy makes her finish twice a week after snack-time and then she knows.

(No more hiding under the bed, Morgan thinks. No more spoiling the jokes on juice pop sticks. 

No more keeping secrets and no more suits that move on their own and no more horrible bedtime stories that go Morgan-went-to-sleep-the-end.)

A big hand wearing a cut-off glove appears, holding a clean pink tissue – it looks a lot like the ones from their downstairs bathroom, in fact – and gently pinches Morgan’s nose. She gives a dutiful honk, although she is crying in big, fishy gulps and it does not do her much good.

“Well,” Thor says, folding the tissue to a clean corner and wiping Morgan’s face, “if a man as clever as your father told you a thing like that, I can’t argue against it.”

“So it’s true?”

“Absolutely.”

“He’s the –” now her mouth does the same thing as Mommy’s, that funny little tremble “—he’s the smartest person ever, isn’t he?”

“He would have to be, to deserve such a child as you.”

The hurt suddenly seems too large for her body to contain and Morgan aches all over, a sharp pain that zings straight down the center of her chest into her arms and hands. She squeezes her fingers tightly but the pain does not go away.

“He’s dead,” she says. “That’s true, too.”

“Yes.” 

“It’s mean.” She sobs and coughs. “It feels bad.”

“I know.”

Thor produces more tissues from his pockets, in such quantities that Morgan suspects he may be part magician, and she goes on crying and crying until she is so tired she closes her eyes.

When she opens them again it is dark outside. She is lying on the couch with an afghan tucked around her, still wearing her black clothes and her scratchy stockings and with the taste of juice pops in her mouth, and the only people left in the whole house are Uncle Rhodey and Mommy who sit talking together in the kitchen. Static cling holds a single long blond hair to Morgan’s dress.

…

The clock reads five minutes past midnight, but Morgan is awake. She sits in bed and watches the curtains rise with the summer wind, sink and rise again, and then the room is illumined by a shutter-flash of lightning.

Using her finger and her palm, Morgan taps out the seconds of winging silence. One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand –

The thunder roars its reply. She smiles.

…


End file.
